Unlucky Lucky Days

About This Title

Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, these 73 tales of our Unlucky Lucky Days might well be termed Dr. Seuss for adults. They call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales and Woody Allen's most literary writing. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, absurdists, surrealists and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham. "Animated by a wonderfully droll and fantastical imagination, these little stories are delicious."—Rikki Ducornet "On each page of Unlucky Lucky Days, a new alternative world opens out, as Grandbois sympathetically animates the emotional worlds of sea squirts, frogs, centipedes, hermit crabs, and even some of the weirder varieties of human beings. These are funny, bizarre, moving stories—a pleasure to read."—Lydia Davis "Grandbois is a master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits."—Brian Evenson "Daniel Grandbois’s trembling leaflets bring to life all the rejecta and detritus scattered in such silent and secretive array around us, recovering all we thought lost or dead."—Eleni Sikelianos "Grandbois writes like a cool mystic raised on a mad diet of glossalalia. His language is spare-rich and at times prophetic. In Unlucky Lucky Days, he offers us a divine look at existence, as if through the eyes of a child for whom Pythagoras might very well be a constellation of gum wads, once upon a time when nobody was born."—Tim Z. Hernandez

The Yarn

A skein of yarn was unwound and wound in the shy hours before dawn. Yarn is naturally nocturnal and achieves locomotion by unwinding and then winding. This particular, purple skein would have been fifty yards end to end, had a bramble not caught and kept a long piece of its tail months before. Undomesticated yarn can live up to a year. Frayed by so many grabbing hands (the rough textures it passed over), the aging yarn pulled itself along, searching for nothing in particular, as that is what yarns do, except the call of almost anyone at all. “Tell us your tale,” a violin spider obliged from its loosely woven web. The yarn stopped in its tracks and laid itself out, as that is how yarns tell their tales. “Leaves one unsatisfied,” commented the sharp spider. “The ending is too abrupt.”